A Cross-cultural Exploration of Children's Everyday Ideas: Implications for science teaching and learning

Abstract

Children's everyday ideas form critical foundations for science learning yet little research has been conducted to understand and legitimize these ideas, particularly from an international perspective. This paper explores children's everyday ideas about the environment across the US, Singapore and China to understand what they reveal about children's relationship to the environment and discuss its implications for science teaching and learning. A social constructivist lens guides research, and a visual methodology is used to frame children's realities. Participants' ages range from elementary to middle school, and a total of 210 children comprized mainly of Asians and Asian Americans were sampled from urban settings. Drawings are used to elicit children's everyday ideas and analyzed inductively using open coding and categorizing of data. Several categories support existing literature about how children view the environment; however, novel categories such as affect also emerged and lend new insight into the role that language, socio-cultural norms and perhaps ethnicity play in shaping children's everyday ideas. The findings imply the need for (a) a change in the role of science teachers from knowledge providers to social developers, (b) a science curriculum that is specific to learners' experiences in different socio-cultural settings, and (c) a shift away from inter-country comparisons using international science test scores.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• Multicultural
• Qualitative research

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank University of Colorado Denver (UCD) doctoral students, Ya-Wen Chang and Austine Luce, for assisting with data analysis; the UCD Center for Faculty Development for a small yet timely grant that supported the write-up of this paper; the Jiangsu Institute of Education in Nanjing, China for facilitating access to study sites; and all who have helped encourage the use of visual methods to further our understanding of people and places.